156 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Also, the economic decline of Spain could be temporarily stalled by an influx of
wealth from America. Although the cities of gold that filled Spanish dreams never ma-
terialized, Spanish colonists extracted enough silver, gold, and other precious sub-
stances to enrich their homeland. However, the result of flooding Europe’s markets
with American silver was similar to what would happen if a modern nation sought to
offset economic problems by printing additional currency: It set off a cycle of infla-
tion that only furthered Spain’s long-term decline.
Even though millions of pounds of silver poured into Spain, its New World
colonies were never profitable. Under the Habsburgs, Spain concentrated its ener-
gies and wealth on expensive military campaigns throughout Europe instead of de-
veloping successful commercial and industrial enterprises as the northern European
powers were doing. The Dutch, British, and French, unhappy with the Pope’s hav-
ing essentially given the New World to Spain and Portugal, sought to gain America’s
wealth through control of commerce and banking, as well as through outright piracy.
In the end, Spain’s royal coffers were nothing more than a funnel through which New
World silver flowed on its way to the pockets of northern European merchants and
bankers.
Spanish attention, following the example of Columbus’s voyages, focused at first
on the Caribbean islands, especially the island of Hispaniola—today shared by the
nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—where the settlement of Santo
Domingo was established in 1496. The native inhabitants of the islands, divided
among many small polities with no standing armies or other organized defensive
forces, were ill-prepared to ward off the Spanish invasion.
Spain’s rulers rewarded successful conquerors with rights to tribute in goods and
labor from the native people. This reward system, which had precedents in the re-
conquista, was called encomienda; an individual who held an encomienda grant was
an encomendero. Encomenderos comprised a colonial aristocracy that from the be-
ginning found its interests often in conflict with those of both the Spanish Crown and
the Church. Encomenderos were officially charged with seeing to the religious in-
struction of the native peoples entrusted to them; the encomenderos’ frequent indif-
ference to this demand was one source of friction between them and their rulers.
The consuming purpose of the early colonists was the search for gold, which
overrode any concern for the long-term integrity of a colonial society. The islands con-
tained some placer deposits of gold, and the native people were compelled to work
the gold fields for the enrichment of their new overlords. Already facing massive
population loss owing to disease, these people saw their survival further threatened
by this forced labor and other abuses: beatings, rapes, and murders. They also suf-
fered from a nutritional crisis resulting from the disruption of their agriculture, hunt-
ing, and fishing.
Such problems only made the people more susceptible to the Old World infec-
tious diseases that European invaders and their African slaves inadvertently intro-
duced to the Americas. Never having been exposed to these bacterial and viral agents,
the native peoples had no natural immunity to the diseases they caused. Mortality
rates when a new disease first struck were as high as one-third of the population,